The following essay was written by Kim Austin and won an honorable mention for the 2004 JET Program Essay Competition. It also appeared in the September 2004 edition of The Tombo Times.

Before I begin this essay I would like to make a brief disclaimer. The topic of my essay is ‘foreign language education,’ but the truth is that despite teaching English in a Japanese high school, I’m no expert in this field. I have only the most cursory knowledge of linguistics, gleaned from a single university paper in which I struggled to get a B. Most of what I have to say about foreign language education in general and katakana in particular doesn’t come from any recognized canon. Instead I offer more of a ground zero perspective, a grunt’s view from the front line of foreign language education. Much of this is anecdotal and is intended to provoke thought on the matter rather than seek a viable solution.

Yukiko was excited that we were finally, after a great deal of fussing about with times and dates, going to have lunch together at her favorite café. She had even brought a glossy brochure replete with pictures of delicious looking fare and my mouth was beginning to water. I was really looking forward to a decent sandwich, hopefully one that didn’t contain half a jar of mayonnaise.

‘So what’s the name of this place, Yukiko?’ I asked lazily, without so much as checking it out in the brochure.

Her reply sounded disturbingly like a word for the part of the body that is usually reserved for sitting on. As such, I thought I had better try the question again.

‘Ah, I beg your pardon Yukiko, where did you say we were eating?’

‘@#$ café,’ Yukiko repeated without as much as a ‘just kidding’ smile. I had to try one more time.

‘Are you sure that’s really what it’s called?’ I asked.

By now Yukiko was starting to get annoyed at my persistent incredulity. She tossed the booklet over to me with a simple ‘read yourself.’ Sure enough there it was, staring up at me in katakana ‘アスカフェ.’ Now I’m no prude but this seemed like a pretty seedy name for a café, even one in Oita City, so I bugged Yukiko once more about it.

‘Why do you think they called it that?’ I asked. She looked at me as if I had just asked the dumbest question in the whole history of dumb questions. She replied slowly, ‘because they like @#$.’ At this point I thought it wise to let the conversation drop. After all, how well did I really know Yukiko? She seemed a nice enough woman and we had had some friendly chats over coffee but perhaps there was more to her than met the eye. We arrived at the café, sat down and were handed a menu. It was then that the light finally dawned on me. On the front of the menu was a large picture of a globe with the name ‘Earth Café’ emblazoned beneath it in English with its katakana equivalent, ‘アスカフェ’ next to it. Despite being in Japan for more than one and a half years, it had happened to me again; I had been ‘katakana-ed!’

My confusion that day stemmed from a fundamental problem encountered by anyone involved in teaching the English language in Japan - the use of katakana to represent English words. The katakana writing system, along with its close relative hiragana, was originally created by Buddhist monks in the ninth century to indicate the correct pronunciation of Chinese texts. Eventually it came to be used primarily to express foreign loan words when the existing Japanese language could not adequately or easily do this. Though loan words have, over the course of years, come from a variety of different languages, such as Chinese, Portuguese and Dutch, most katakana words used in Japanese today are derived from English. However, while some katakana words are fairly simple to figure out, many are about as decipherable to the average English speaker as Greek. This has led to a great deal of dialogue within Japan’s Anglophone community. In an article for the Japan Times entitled Howai notto aborisshu katakana, the author claims that ‘katakana throws a wrecking ball at loan-word pronunciation, mangling foreign sounds to fit the contortions of the Japanese tongue.’ I agree with this statement wholeheartedly and the following are some personal favorites:

Love = ‘rabu(ラブ)’ The first time I heard this I thought the kids meant ‘rub’ and was hoping for one of the famous shoulder massages that my predecessor was rumored to receive. I was very wrong and they were very amused.

Mc Donald’s = ‘makudonarudo(マクドナルド)’ This is a good example of how doubling the amount of syllables in any given English word is a sure-fire way of making certain that an English speaker will not have a clue what you are trying to say.

England/English = ‘igirisu(イギリス)’ This one has to be the ultimate in irony. It took me more than a week to figure it out. Okay, so I’m not the sharpest pencil in the case, but to a katakana tyro that one was tricky.

Why shouldn’t the Japanese adapt foreign words to suit their speech patterns? After all, transliteration is not a new phenomenon, nor is it exclusive to Japanese. English does this all the time. We take karaoke (カラオケ) and twist it into something resembling ‘carry-oki’, we also swipe numerous words from just about every language under the sun and anglicize them in ways that render them completely unintelligible to their native speakers. In my home country, New Zealand, the indigenous Maori population has incorporated a number of English words into their vocabulary including many common names. Like Japanese, the Maori language also lacks some of the necessary sounds to make a direct leap to English, so the words often change completely. For example, the name ‘Joseph’ becomes ‘Hohepa,’ and ‘William’ becomes ‘Wiremu’.

Why then is katakana so different? When English speakers steal a word from another language, it becomes an English word that simply has a foreign origin. The same can be said for Maori. William is an English name, but Wiremu is a Maori name with
(continued on page 2)

English roots. Katakana, on the other hand, appears to be seriously considered English by many Japanese people. I was in a restaurant not long after I arrived in Japan, and my companion expressed surprise as I waded through the katakana menu trying desperately to locate anything that sounded familiar. ‘But Kimu san, it’s in English!’ he declared. Much debate ensued. Another time, in a particularly embarrassing episode, I side-stepped a lengthy conversation in Japanese with ‘I’m sorry but I don’t understand enough Japanese,’ only to be informed by someone else that my thwarted conversation partner had in fact been speaking English, or rather katakana ‘English.’ Katakana encourages the mispronunciation of English in general as it has imposed itself as a de facto system of articulation for all English words.

One of the things that I find most worrying about katakana pronunciation is that slowly but surely I have found myself having to adopt it in order to be understood. At first I swore that I would never be party to something so counterproductive to my purpose in Japan. However, after a few weeks of being clear and misunderstood, I began to feel the pull of the dark side. It started out innocently enough when, in trying to encourage a struggling student, I said ‘it is an apparu’. It was the beginning of a slippery slope. Before long I was asking the kids about ‘Abaru Rabiin’ songs and informing them that I ate dinner at ‘Joyfuru’. Now there is a distinct possibility that my English won’t be understood when I return home.

Across the land, from Hokkaido to Hiji, students can be heard using katakana to brutalize the English language. At first glance (or should that be ‘first listen’?), English classes in Japan appear to be a competition as to how many syllables can be slotted into any given word. The result is often a complete mess. Furthermore, it breaks my heart to have to inform the likes of diligent little Shinji, who studies his heart out at juku every day after school instead of playing soccer with his pals, that ordering a ‘banira aisukuriimu’ (バニラアイスクリーム) in an English speaking country is considerably more likely to get him a blank stare than any delicious chilled confectionary.

Before coming to Japan I spent a year in Taiwan teaching English to young children. Like all second language learners these kids struggled to speak clearly and make themselves understood. Some of them had very strong Taiwanese accents and it took a while before I could understand them easily. My students in Japan not only have this to contend with but they are also hindered by a nationwide method of teaching that seems to deliberately encourage them to mispronounce English. I employed a technique with my students in Taiwan in which we spent the first few minutes of class just making sounds as we looked at letters and words. The difference it made was incredible and before long the children’s speech showed a marked improvement. I have tried this here but met with limited success as the students usually have the words written in front of them in katakana and are hearing one thing but seeing another, hence making learning English even more confusing. Whenever I mention my concerns about the use of katakana in the classroom to my JTEs they invariably point out that the students need to use katakana because English spelling is so very bizarre and confusing. I would be the first to admit that the vagaries of English spelling can be a real nightmare, even for native speakers. However, I think that avoiding tackling this problem head on only compounds it and ultimately does a great disservice to anyone trying to learn English.

What lurks behind all these problems is the worrying fact that Japan consistently achieves some of the lowest TOEFL scores in all of Asia. The latest scores were as low as those for North Korea. Yes, you read that right - North Korea. The question that begs asking is how on earth does the world’s second wealthiest country, blessed with dedicated teachers and a sound education system, achieve the same results as one of the poorest and most culturally isolated countries in the world? Clearly it would be a bit of a stretch to lay all the blame at the feet of katakana, but I do think that it is at least in part responsible and a lead candidate for change. The reason I feel so strongly about this issue is that every time I look into the bright and eager faces of my students I feel as if they have been short-changed. They deserve better than this. They work hard and their end reward is meager. Many simply give up due to frustration at their lack of progress. I teach at a junior high and watching keen first-years lose hope as they fail to advance at an adequate pace is one of the saddest things for a teacher to see. I really like the kids that I teach and as much as katakana troubles me as an English speaker, the way it affects the children’s learning worries me considerably more.

During the course of my research for this essay I spoke to many other ALTs in order to gauge their views on this subject. I discovered that mentioning katakana to an ALT was akin to flapping a red rag in front of a bull. Reactions ranged from mild dislike to long rants about how katakana was Satan’s own handiwork (note to myself - don’t interview ALTs at the pub). No one had anything positive to say about it, and the word ‘detrimental’ was bandied about liberally. Now comes the difficult part, a solution. I can think of one particularly good one - stop using it! At the very least in the classroom. This would obviously be impossible to achieve in one fell swoop, but I sincerely believe that a commitment to the gradual phasing out of katakana in the classroom is not only desirable but crucial if English language education in Japan is to improve within the foreseeable future.